Mahoba (up): A staggering 4,271 voters were found registered under a single house number in Mahoba’s Jaitpur gram panchayat, exposing a major lapse in the ongoing revision of electoral rolls for the 2026 Panchayat polls in Uttar Pradesh. The discovery has triggered outrage, raising doubts over the integrity of voter lists and the accountability of officials tasked with safeguarding democracy.
The anomaly came to light when booth-level officers went door to door and found that three wards of genuine voters had been lumped under house number 803 because of faulty numbering and data entry.
“The voters are genuine. Only the addresses were wrongly clubbed. We are correcting the irregularities,” admitted Assistant District Election Officer R P Vishwakarma, blaming ambiguous rural property records.
But critics say the error is too glaring to be brushed aside. In nearby Panwari town, 243 people were shown at house number 996 and another 185 at house number 997. Locals said homes with barely five or six members had suddenly become host to hundreds of voters. “When one house has voters from every caste and community, it destroys faith in the system,” said social activist Chaudhary Ravindra Kumar.
The Opposition has seized on the revelations. The Samajwadi Party has accused the ruling BJP of ignoring irregularities that could tilt elections in their favour. “When one house shows thousands of voters, it is not a mistake but a failure of governance. The BJP wants to tamper with democracy at the grassroots,” said SP spokesperson Rajeev Rai.
The Congress too demanded accountability from the Election Commission. “If this can happen in Mahoba, what guarantee is there that rolls in other districts are accurate? Free and fair elections cannot happen with such shoddy preparation,” said Congress leader
Aradhana Mishra.
District officials insist there was no deliberate wrongdoing and blamed outdated record-keeping and data migration lapses during digitisation. Authorities have ordered a re-mapping of addresses by breaking down house numbers into subcategories.
The controversy comes after an audit last year flagged more than one lakh suspect entries in Mahoba’s voter rolls, including thousands of duplicates across Jaitpur, Panwari, Kabrai and Charkhari. Currently, 486 booth-level officers and 49 supervisors are working across 273 gram panchayats to clean up the lists before the December deadline for draft rolls.
Political analysts say the incident reflects a deeper malaise. “Electoral integrity does not collapse overnight. It is weakened through negligence. If such errors go unchecked, they open the door for manipulation,” said Manoj Bhadra. Another analyst, R N Bajpayee, warned, “For a democracy, faulty rolls are like termites. They may appear clerical, but the damage is corrosive and long-term.”
With villagers expressing fear of proxy voting and bogus entries, the pressure is now on the Election Commission and district administration to prove that Mahoba’s shocking lapse is not a glimpse of a
larger rot.